What’s On | Top Visual Arts Events in May

Check out our top picks of visual arts events in May taking place around the country!

Fore, fold uses a ghost story, embedded in the history of Marsh’s Library, to unpack the exchanges between myth, language, material and place. An allusion to the Heideggerian Fourfold linking the earth, sky, divinities and mortals, Fore, fold also plays on the idea of multiplicity. This is an ongoing concern both in the casting processes Marie Farrington employs and in relation to the historical multiplicities that present themselves in the objects, forms and places researched.

Marie Farrington’s practice is an ongoing attempt to draw gentle attention to the elusive, the momentary and the residual. Tracing the intimate intersections between history, knowledge and making, Marie’s work uncovers the subtle forces and entropies contained in materials.

Her sculptures act as ephemeral testing grounds, evoking a spectral presence while revealing invisible processes and tiny occurrences unfolding in spaces and on surfaces. Her practice offsets language against sculptural forms to conflate tenses and offer a tenuous sense of narrative to groups of materials that are chronologically-bound. Many of Marie’s pieces, although working within a concept of sculpture, exist as flat planes and use acts such as folding, layering, polishing or covering to establish a sense of image-hood that emphasises the notion of surface as a point of intersection between sculptures, images and architectural forms.

This is a group exhibition that brings together four individual artistic practices that engage with space, interiors and sites using distinct voices and methodologies. The exhibition takes as its starting points the structures, ornamentation and navigation of internal domestic and public space. These ideas were developed through discussions around a collection of shared texts, selected by each artist in response to the initial exhibition proposal, that resonate with their distinct practices.

The texts, which include critical, philosophical and political essays, fiction and poetry, give an insight into each artist’s approach to research, and provide a broader frame of reference for the exhibition. Frequent individual and group studio visits invited further conversation and reflection between the artists at all stages of development and, as a result, this exhibition has been guided by the shared sensibilities of the four singular practitioners.

In Eugene Conway’s paintings, the landscape of North County Kilkenny is brought to centre stage. These are quiet scenes; he does not dwell on the bucolic or the picturesque. His subjects – bridges, barns and byways – are the unsung heroes of the Irish countryside, the aspects of the landscape that you notice when you live there.

Conway’s work is meticulously observed. The landscapes are unpeopled, but show the marks that human life has left behind. Some of the barns and cottages are abandoned but the work is not about abandonment. Other houses are lived in, the fields are farmed and the hedges trimmed. A farm might have a new galvanised gate, with the old ones used as part of the fencing. The work reflects the layers of history left by habitation and farming.

Miriam McConnon’s exhibition Domestic Resistance reflects on the human narrative of displacement and in particular the struggle to establish a new home following conflict. She does this through a body of paintings depicting a carefully chosen set of domestic objects. The work is concerned with the social aspect of conflict rather than a political one. It examines the gendered nature of conflict, the resilience of the domestic space and its necessity in the struggle to overcome displacement and begin again.

Over the past year McConnon has met and informally interviewed several women from conflict areas such as Serbia, Egypt, Cyprus, Iran, Lebanon and Syria. These women shared their stories of survival with McConnon and the objects that represent their experience of creating a new home in order to start over.

A child’s shoe, two dead roses, a Syrian banknote, a ceramic plate and an embroidered placemat are among the chosen objects. The objects lie alone on the canvas disenfranchised from their environment. They have become evidential testimonies to the female story of displacement

Come Back to Me is an interim exhibition of new work by 14 MFA students at NCAD curated by Brendan Fox.

An artist’s studio is a catapult for contemporary concepts. An idea, once loaded, may be drawn for an intensive period of time with variable tension. This gestation period of elasticity lends itself to repetitive stretching, looping conceptual thinking, referential appropriation, consistent reevaluation of the contextual terms of the loaded entity and its relationship with the evolving environmental factors it may encounter once released into orbit.

Come Back to Me—a pre-apocalyptic lament—often situates the individual as a point of departure, where we may consider identity as a distorted perception of self and memory as form. These works then sprawl into a psychogeography that encounters contemporary modular forms, deserted architecture and the imposition of new borders. Haunted by nostalgia, and laden with the clunk of contemporary disillusionment, Come Back to Me contemplates perhaps the ultimate escape; to outer space, as we wrestle to comprehend the impending catastrophe of the geological epoch, the Anthropocene.

The decision to come together and collaborate came from discussions the artists had around issues of the human body and indeed their own bodies. They explored these personal concerns directly by photographing and audio-recording themselves in conversation naked.

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